


Ladies of the Lands of the Sun

by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Alien Culture, Backstory, Community: dai_stiho, F/M, Gen, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-14
Updated: 2011-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 09:06:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the summer following Roshaun’s disappearance, Dairine spends more and more time on Wellakh, while Miril struggles to control the political unrest that’s forcing her to remember some parts of her past she would rather forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ladies of the Lands of the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Great and bountiful thanks are due to Araine, who, in addition to acting as a beta for this story and responding to my frantic “this isn’t working!” emails with cool logic and common sense, has severely influenced my Wellakh-related headcanon with her [YW forums post on Wellakhit society](http://www.youngwizards.com/forums/ships-character-issues/2212-wellakh-social-structure-forest-teal-deer.html) (as has input from the forums members who responded to this post). Without her, this story would have foundered and died long ago.

In the hot months, when even the old and powerful climate wizardries surrounding the palace had trouble balancing out the daytime heat and the nighttime chill, Miril dreamed of her childhood, when she and Sephiri and their parents had retreated from the Burnt Side of Wellakh to a safe house nestled between the foot of a mountain and the edge of a large lake that was fed by the meltwater and always cool.

Miril had liked the house by the lake. Her family never stayed very long, but when they were there, she didn’t have to do lessons or dress up for court or be polite to other people’s childre. Instead she would spend all day in the shallows of the lake, in the shade of the great red trees, and dream of a life where water was plentiful and plants grew wild under the sky, not tamed in a conservatory or arranged in a formal garden. She wasn’t allowed far enough into the woods to get lost, so she lay on her back beside one of the great trees and wondered what it would be like to be utterly surrounded by the thick russet trunks, the world around her dappled pink by the sunlight scattering through the leaves.

When she had tried to sneak into the woods, despite her parents’ warnings, Seph had kept her out. “It’s not safe,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and doing her best impersonation of their mother’s glare. “We’re safe by the lake. But if we get lost in the woods, they might never find us. You don’t want to get lost in the woods, Miril.” And Miril had nodded and listened, because Seph was three years older and she knew everything. Especially things Miril tended to forget, like how to sit still without fidgeting, and how to be quiet even when she had something to say, and how to smile even when she didn’t mean it.

At least when they were at the lake, they had no visitors. They gated there alone, just the four of them, and for a few days Miril did not have to worry so much about what she said or who might be listening. Every morning she walked down the rock-paved path to the shore and kept on walking into the lake until her feet almost couldn’t touch the ground to keep her head above the water. She would stand very still, slowing her breathing, swaying gently in the slight currents, until the small silver fish that lived in the lake lost their shyness, swimming and shimmering around her legs and outstretched fingers.

Miril never knew if the dreams were influenced by wizardry or by mere biology, but they came every year during the hot months and made her look back at the things she would rather forget.

*

They had begun, ostensibly, by talking about Sol. Nelaid had said that he could assist Dairine in the use of the Sunstone, which he suspected had been tuned to her star in the same wizardry that had caused Roshaun to vanish. Dairine saw that image in dreams: the sudden look on his face, of shock at something that hadn’t worked out the way he’d planned, followed by the disappearance, the slow floating down of the torc of gold in the moon’s gravity, until it hit the ground and bounced before it settled. She knew she should have some memory of the rest of the battle—of Ponch’s transformation, of defeating the Lone One and the Pullulus—but when she thought back to the dark side of the moon, all she saw was that golden torc falling down, down, down, golden yellow now to match her own G0 star.

Nelaid had started with the basics of stellar energy manipulation, trying whenever possible to use Sol in his examples, but when it came to more complex topics he inevitably fell back to Thahit. At first Dairine worked to apply what he said about Thahit to workings she might be able to perform on Sol, but it soon became apparent to her that this was not, at heart, Nelaid’s intention. Thahit was what he knew, and handling Thahit was what he would teach her.

When he did not seem forthcoming with the information, she had asked him at the end of the third lesson about what, exactly, the Sunstone had been made to _do_.

“It wasn’t made,” he’d said after a moment. “It was _found_. They came across it when they were carving up this place”—his arm swept outwards in a casual gesture that encompassed the room and the palace of which it was a part—“and its color matched Thahit, so the first Sunlord thought to make it a symbol of his power. It wasn’t until later that he discovered it had certain useful properties—that it bent space in a particularly convenient way for someone dealing with our star.”

Dairine put a hand up to the stone that rested against the base of her throat. “Was that because it survived the Burning?” she asked. “Or could it have been _formed_ by the Burning?” She was a little rusty on the details of gemstone formation, but it seemed at least plausible that an artifact that had managed to survive Thahit’s onslaught, and been imbued with the power of generations of Sunlords, might take on a life of its own, doing its best to fight the same fight as the men and women who had worn it.

“Perhaps,” Nelaid said. “Perhaps not. If you had asked me about it a month ago, I would have said that what it has done now—shifting its color, aligning itself in part with another star—is impossible. And we both know now that it is not.”

He turned his face away from her, but not before Dairine could see a flicker of pain, quickly masked over. She felt an answering echo of hurt in the pit of her stomach. Days before, this kind of reminder of what she had endured would have had her doubled over, crying angry tears at the injustice of a universe that just kept _taking_ things, no matter whose sons or daughters or mothers or friends they were—but here, in the presence of one who had lost so much more than she had, and who carried on despite it, she knew that such a display of emotion would serve no purpose. Nelaid had agreed to take her on and train her, even though every time he saw her it must remind him of his son, the lessons he had given _him_ , the fear that he might never return. He had treated Dairine with a great deal more respect than her actions toward him had ever earned, and Dairine was resolved to make herself worthy of this. She would figure out the mysteries of the Sunstone. She would find Roshaun. And the best way to do both of those things was to shove the pain down into the dark corners of her heart, where it couldn’t distract her from what needed to be done.

*

Dairine was in the middle of laying out a particularly challenging working when the model of Thahit stuttered and froze before her. The sudden stop made her feel disoriented, like she’d just stepped off a treadmill or a moving sidewalk, and in the moment of lost concentration she invalidated a character of the spell she had been tracing in the air with a finger. Nelaid had insisted she improve at drawing out these diagrams without Spot’s aid, and after the way the Winged Defender’s information had made her computer misbehave, Dairine could not entirely blame him, but Spot’s sensoria would not have led him to interrupt this spelling the way her human senses had.

Dairine started to seethe with the unfairness of it all, but checked her anger as Nelaid came around from the other side of the model. “What did you do?” he asked.

“That was me,” said a voice from behind the two of them. Nelaid jumped, and for a second his face bore an expression Dairine knew all too well—expressing, as it did, the sudden foreknowledge of a serious talking-to. She rose from where she had knelt on the ground and turned, too, to see Lady Miril standing in the doorway. She might not display her aura like her husband did, but she was still a force to be reckoned with...even when clad in what Dairine knew to be the Wellakhit version of pajamas, complete with robe and slippers.

“Some day, when I find myself with some free time, I am going to reprogram this particular simulation for the benefit of future Sun Ladies,” Miril said, “so that they will not have to leave their quarters in the middle of the night to tell their husbands that it is the middle of the night.”

Dairine jumped at that. _Oh crud, how’d I manage to lose track of time? Dad’s gonna throw a fit. Especially after last time..._

She looked to Nelaid. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t realize it was so late. I have to get home.” She bowed to him and again to his wife, before brushing past Lady Miril, Spot scuttling along behind her.

Dairine had spent a little time a few weeks back talking to her dad about how to interpret the spin-off data he received whenever she was offplanet, so he would at least know where she was, and since school was out for the summer it wasn’t as if he could be angry at her for cutting class. But she _did_ still have a curfew, and even if galactic time zones were difficult to figure out, Dairine was pretty sure she wouldn’t get back before ten without a timeslide, something she didn’t have the authority or the power to pull off.

“Alright, Spot,” she said, with a sigh and the start of a headache. “You know the drill...”

*

“This,” Miril said, glaring at her husband, “cannot keep happening.”

“I know,” he said. With a flicker of power, Nelaid tapped into the built-in wizardries that allowed the Sunlord and his immediate kin to transport themselves effortlessly from room to room within the palace—particularly into those rooms within the royal suite that lacked more conventional doors—and Miril found the two of them standing in their bedroom.

“You know I hate it when you do that without warning me,” she said, sitting down on the edge of their bed.

Nelaid shrugged out of the overrobe he’d been wearing and hung it up in one of his wardrobes as if nothing untoward had happened. “I thought you would hate it more if one of the guards came across us arguing in the middle of the night.”

Miril squeezed her eyes shut tight and prayed to the Aethyrs for patience. “You can think about that,” she said, “but not about what it would look like if the same guards came across you feeding planetary secrets to an alien girl in the middle of the night?”

Nelaid winced and rubbed his eyes. “Is that how _you_ see it?”

“You know as well as I do that this isn’t about how you and I see things,” she said. “Nelaid, we’re both going through hell here, but we still have a planet to serve!”

“We’ve served this planet from the moment we were born,” he countered. “And how has it served us? I lost my brother—you lost your sister—and now we’ve lost our son!” His last words came out in something close to a sob, and it took all the strength that Miril possessed not to break down, then and there, because every day she woke up and thought the same damn thing and wondered if it would ever get better, if the pain of all of it would ever just stop, and it _didn’t_ , but that wasn’t an excuse for giving in.

She stood and paced across the carpeted floor to look her husband squarely in the eye. “I know exactly who we have lost, Nelaid,” she said. “And they are what keep me here, every day, doing my job. Because if I stand by and let this planet be taken over by those who believe covert assassinations should be part of the political process, then Auren and Sephiri and Roshaun have all been lost _for nothing_.”

For a moment, Nelaid said nothing, just stared there at her with the hardest eyes she’d ever seen, as green and as frozen as precious stones. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked.

“ _We_ need to think about backing a candidate for your successor,” Miril said.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said. _And as soon as my successor is in place, I_ will _be_ , she heard him think, beneath flickering images of the attempts he had witnessed and survived.

“You abdicated,” Miril said, choosing not to respond to his unsaid remarks—not knowing how she could have. “Roshaun returned the power of Sunwatch to you for the duration of his absence, but you know that’s not the same as the power to rule. _That_ is embodied in the willing descendents of the line of Nuiiliat, and your abdication precludes you from reclaiming that power.”

He turned away from her and said, barely above a whisper, “She thinks she might be able to bring him back.”

She went to him, then, and took his hands in her own and leaned her forehead against his. “I know,” she said. “But he isn’t back, and we can’t keep stalling. We are going to have to find a way to run this planet without him.”

“And if he returns?”

“ _When_ he returns,” Miril said, “he will have many questions about what we have accomplished in his absence. We owe it to him to have a long list of good answers.”

She felt him relax against her. “So much has changed,” he said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“For now,” Miril said, “can we start by getting enough sleep?”

Nelaid smiled at that—a small smile, but at this point Miril wasn’t going to be picky.

Some minutes later when they were both in bed and the lights were switched off, Nelaid said, “The girl does show promise. The Sunstone responds to her. I am not going to stop her training.”

“I would never ask you to,” Miril said, curling her body towards him. “But even if you are not keeping track of the time you spend with her, I assure you, there are others who are…and they are not as forgiving as I am.”

*

There were no worldgates on the Burnt Side of Wellakh. To Dairine, this made perfect sense—even minor trauma could seriously affect the hyperstrings gates were hung on, and the Burning of Wellakh had been anything but minor—but it was also a subject of great annoyance. Roshaun’s custom worldgate had vanished with him, and Dairine spent enough time traveling back and forth between Earth and Wellakh that personal transits weren’t an option. She needed to use established gates if she was going to have enough energy after the gating to be good for anything, but even Wellakh’s established gates weren’t exactly reliable.

She had left the palace as soon as she had realized how late she was going to be, transiting to the nearest gate, only to discover that it had uprooted itself and was now several kilometers away from its last reported location. She did the short transit to the new gate site only to find out from Spot that the wandering gate and its closest neighbor were currently out of service. Dairine had been forced to do _another_ short transit and make her way home through the one remaining functioning gate.

As a result, it was well after midnight when she finally entered her house through the back door, exhausted from the day’s work followed by the multiple transits. The kitchen light was on, and her dad sat at the counter in shorts and an old t-shirt, his hands curled around a cup of coffee. Dairine knew it was just the decaf instant stuff—if he had the real stuff any time after dinner he’d never get to sleep—but to her overworked brain, it smelled a lot like heaven.

The last thing she wanted was to face him now, but she knew she didn’t have a choice. Spot aimed a few eyestalks up at her before turning around and scuttling away in the direction of the staircase, leaving her alone with her father.

“At least I don’t need to ask _where_ you’ve been,” her dad said in his best voice of cold detachment. His cell phone lay face-up on the counter beside him. Nita had told Dairine that the whole streaming consciousness thing freaked Dad out a bit, and he didn’t want to use it if he didn’t have to…but when she hadn’t been home by curfew, he must’ve pulled up the livestream to make sure she was alright.

“I’m sorry,” Dairine said, trying her best to sound contrite, but probably only succeeding at sounding tired. “I left as soon as I realized I’d lost track of time. But then the worldgates over there were acting up, so it took me longer than expected to get back here.”

“That sounds an awful lot like an excuse,” her dad said, turning to face her. “And I am _not_ in the mood for excuses. You have a _talking computer_. Did you ever think that you could ask it to warn you when your curfew was approaching?”

Dairine blushed. She hadn’t thought of it. She made a mental note to talk with Spot about this as soon as she got upstairs…if her father ever let her out of his sight again.

Her dad sighed. “After this last time, I really thought we were getting somewhere,” he said. “Even Tom and Carl tell me that wizards have to have day jobs. And right now, being a part of this family _is_ your day job.”

Dairine grit her teeth, determined not to say anything that would screw this up. Her dad was tired, too, and the next day was a workday. If she just waited for him to wear himself out, she’d be able to postpone at least a portion of their discussion until the next morning. But she couldn’t help thinking how devastatingly unfair all of this was. Here she was trying to do what she could to keep the primaries of two systems stable and restore the heir to a major planetary throne, and she was still stuck with a ten o’clock curfew.

“I’m sorry,” Dairine said. In a calculated gamble she added, “And I’m tired. Can we talk about this tomorrow? Nelaid’s busy anyway, so I’ll be around here all day, catching up on my chores.”

Her father rubbed at his forehead, and Dairine could tell that the gamble had worked—but that didn’t mean he was pleased about being played. “Go,” he said. “And don’t let me hear of you going _anywhere_ until we finish this.”

Dairine nodded and headed upstairs for her room before he could change his mind.

*

Sometimes, bitter with guilt, Miril thought that she had gotten everything she had wanted: for the first time in her adult memory, no one was trying to kill her, or her husband. No one could find her son to kill him. She’d wondered what it would be like, to live without that threat. She had never imagined it would come at such a price.

There had been no more assassination attempts since Roshaun’s disappearance had been made public. The rules of succession were unclear—there had been no preparation for the possibility that a new king would simply go missing, so soon after the old king had willingly given up his crown. There was no point in trying to kill anyone when the chaos of an empty throne meant that alliances were shifting rapidly. When they settled back down again, Miril had no doubt that the threats would return. In the meantime, Nelaid sat in on all of the councils that required his attendance and exercised the authority of the Sunwatch, but he was only a regent, not a ruler—and the whispers suggested that if he continued spending so much time training Dairine rather than searching out political support, his days as regent would be numbered.

Miril knew she ought to use this time to her advantage, working to subtly shift marriage alliances into configurations that would best suit her family’s interests, gathering intelligence and making new friends within the First Families and without, as circumstances required. She did her best to play the part—sitting in on the requisite meetings, securing invitations for herself and Nelaid to all of the right gatherings, and keeping her information network open—but it was hard to be around so many people who did not understand the white-hot pain that flared up in her sometimes, as if she had swallowed a star and felt it burning her up from the inside out.

She had approved of her husband’s decision to abdicate. She had convinced Nelaid it would be a good idea to send Roshaun out on excursus before the announcement was made, to give him a last chance to see something outside Wellakhit space and to shield him from harm during the transition. Rationally, she knew that this was nothing more than the Lone One, trying to make her useless with pain, but in her gut, Miril was sure that without her intervention, her son would still be alive and well.

She hated every minute of it, but most of all she hated that, once again, planetary politics were preventing her from taking time to herself and coming to terms with her grief.

*

The next morning, Dairine was already awake and eating her breakfast when Nita meandered into the kitchen. “Morning,” she said. Dairine mumbled something noncommittal and munched her cereal extra loud.

Her sister didn’t try to get a response out of her. Instead, she shuffled around the kitchen, filling the teapot with water and setting it on the stove to boil. Dairine was almost done with her cereal and about to congratulate herself on escaping the inevitable sisterly talking-to when Nita sat down across from her with her mug of steeping tea and said, “I don’t need to tell you that he worries about you.”

“Then why _are_ you telling me?” Dairine said. She really wasn’t in the mood for this. The headache from the night before had not gone away, and she had a long list of chores to get around to before her father got home.

“Let me rephrase—I _shouldn’t_ need to tell you,” Nita said, fixing Dairine with a harsh glare. “But apparently, I do, since you didn’t get home till after midnight!”

“Look,” Dairine said, “I already talked with him about this. It was a one-time thing, it’s not gonna happen again, now can everyone stop getting on my case about it? Besides, how many times in the last week have _you_ been out past curfew?”

Nita blushed. “Never by more than half an hour. And Dad hasn’t said anything to me about it.”

“Dad doesn’t know you’re coming home late ‘cause you’ve been busy running around with Kit, holding hands and looking longingly into each other’s eyes and doing who _knows_ what else.” Dairine rolled her eyes. Under any other circumstances, she might have been happy that her sister and Kit had stopped dancing around each other like the awkward teenagers they were, but apparently admitting their feelings to each other had just made them _more_ awkward, and a whole lot more sappy. The way they looked at each other when they thought no one was looking made Dairine’s stomach clench—whether with nausea or envy, she could never tell.

Nita, if it was possible, had turned even redder. “Dairine—”

“Relax,” she said, “it’s not like _I’m_ going to be the one to tell Dad—I figure I should save you the privilege. But I’m not gonna let you get away with calling the kettle black.”

Nita groaned, then took a sip of tea. “Is it that obvious?” she said.

Dairine rolled her eyes. She’d spent the better part of the last week on another planet, and she’d still figured it out. “He didn’t used to walk you home,” she said. “Or stand, and talk, and _not_ talk with you on the back doorstep for about ten minutes before heading back to his place.”

Dairine filed away Nita’s expression of pure mortification for later reference. Perhaps the day wouldn’t be a total bust, after all.

*

Dairine took a break from her chores and met Carl on his lunch break at a cafe in Grand Central. He ordered a sandwich, she ordered a large coffee.

“Aren’t you a little young for that stuff?” Carl asked as the two of them found a table and sat down.

Dairine rolled her eyes. “You sound just like my dad,” she said. “I figure, if I’m old enough to save the world, I’m old enough to handle basic caffeine. And besides, I’m tired.”

“Late night?” Carl asked, a hint of reproach beneath the casual question.

“How—?”

“Your father called this morning,” he said, leaning back in his chair and regarding Dairine with a raised eyebrow. “He’s got a lot on his plate. I’d say you owe it to him not to add to that.”

 _Is_ everyone _going to give me this speech?_ “I lost track of time,” she said, feeling like a broken record. “It won’t happen again.” She took a sip of her coffee and ignored Carl’s gaze.

Carl raised an eyebrow. “He said you mentioned some difficulty with the worldgates on Wellakh. I assume that’s why you wanted to talk to me.”

Dairine was glad for the chance to change the subject. “They act like toddlers throwing temper tantrums,” she complained. “They know what they’re supposed to do, they just don’t _want_ to. I just keep thinking, if someone could give them a good talking-to…”

Carl shrugged. “There are a lot of wizards who’ve tried to fix those gates over the years,” he said. “But the Burning seems to have given them a permanent case of the shivers. It’s almost like the gates are _afraid_ to be in one place for too long, even if the constant uprooting makes them nonfunctional for large spans of time.”

“The _gates_ are afraid?”

“You’re the one who compared them to toddlers,” Carl said. “They’re more complex than a great number of inanimate objects, and you’ve been a wizard long enough to know that even the gravel in your driveway has a personality. Yes, gates can produce an affect, especially if they’ve been around for some time—and Wellakh was gate-capable long before the Burning. The gates that survived it _remember_ it.”

Dairine sighed. “So what you’re saying is that no amount of brute force is going to fix this one.”

Carl shook his head. “Gates aren’t about brute force, anyway—sure, you _can_ force them, but that’s usually only an option if you’re _trying_ to disrupt them. Getting them back in working order is more about finesse and training. Not unlike stars, in that way. Easy to upset, and far trickier to fix.”

Carl’s gaze rested for a minute at the base of Dairine’s neck, and she realized that she was still wearing the Sunstone. She was so used to it, she hardly noticed when it was on anymore. “Too bad I can’t just specialize in everything,” Dairine said. “I’m sure some Wellakhit wizard is probably working on it. I just figured I’d see if there was an easy solution.”

Carl raised an eyebrow at her. “This is wizardry,” he said, leaning across the table and regarding her seriously. “The easy solutions tend to be the wrong ones.”

*

Later that afternoon, Miril found herself walking through the formal garden at the base of the mountain palace. This late in the season, even the well-cared-for tephal trees of the royal gardens were losing their foliage to the unremitting sunlight, but the largest retained enough of their leaves to provide some sort of shade. Miril sought out the largest of these, and secluded herself by its trunk. She shrugged her shoulders slowly, trying to release some of the tension that had come to rest between her shoulder blades, before leaning back against the tree. Upper body pressed against the rough red bark, she dug back into her memory and imagined the feel of a cool breeze, so different from the still heat or the occasional raging windstorm of the Burnt Side.

 _That is...unusual_ , the tree said after a moment.

 _It used to be as common here as anywhere else_ , Miril said. _But then..._

 _But then the fires came_ , the tree replied. _The stones beneath the earth have told me stories. And now the winds are never quite so gentle, and the Sun..._

 _What about the Sun?_ Miril asked.

 _It isn’t ready for us, yet_ , the tree said. _It’s still afraid. And sometimes, so are we_.

Miril sighed. _I think we all are._ She took a deep breath in through her nostrils, feeling her chest expand with air, then let it all out slowly.

“Lady Miril?”

Miril opened her eyes at the sound of her name, and found herself looking at a young woman, barely more than a girl, dressed in the uniform of a groundskeeper, with dark hair tied back in a braid and dark eyes that seemed at once cautious and clever. “Yes?” she said, searching her memory for the woman’s name.

“You told me to come to you if I ever heard anything interesting,” she said, pushing her braid back over her shoulder. Miril nodded for her to continue. “I was replanting some of the buds on the East Lawn, and I heard Reyva dev il Andriiv talking with someone I didn’t recognize about betrothing her daughter to someone named Dauren?”

Miril pursed her lips. Reyva’s daughter could not have been more than four years old, and as for Dauren—if he was who Miril thought he was, he couldn’t have been much older. Not to mention that both of their families had their own personal reasons to distrust Wellakh’s current rulers, and an alliance between them could be an early attempt to wrest control of the regency from Nelaid’s hands. “Thank you for sharing this with me,” Miril said, rising to her feet. “Remind me of your name?”

“Aryl am Mora,” the girl said. “My mother is Mora am Selmari—she coordinates the flower arrangements for the palace.”

“Thank you, Aryl,” Miril said, making an effort to connect the name with the face. “You’ve done me a service.” She smiled and tried her best to look welcoming, though part of her brain was already hard at work determining who she ought to see to confirm this information, and what she could do to counter it if it were true.

*

Dairine hated doing chores. It wasn’t that they were terribly difficult—she could get them done on time all the time, if that was what she wanted. It was just that other things always seemed so much more important, and it seemed like a shame that her father wouldn’t let her build wizardries that would get the work done for her. “It’d be good practice for me as a wizard,” she’d told her dad once, when she’d suggested that it would be very easy to get the trash to take itself out without attracting any notice.

“It’d be absolutely no practice for you as a daughter, though,” he’d said, trying to look stern but still letting a smile creep up at the corners of his mouth.

Dairine sighed. She hated not being on good terms with her dad—but no matter what Nita might say, he just didn’t understand. No one who wasn’t a wizard really could.

She felt something nudge her ankle, then looked down to see Spot standing there, propped up on a few spidery legs. _You’ve got mail_ , he said.

Dairine bent down, picked him up, and set him on the counter. “Pull up the message?”

The manual functions on Spot’s screen blanked out, to be replaced by the computer-based version of the wizardly messaging system. “It’s from the gate tech on Wellakh,” she said. She’d messaged him after meeting with Carl, asking what was being done about the gates and offering any assistance the gating team might need. The response was short and to-the-point:

 _Thanks for your concern regarding the gates. Sorry to say there is little to be done at present. However if you find yourself free and would like to talk more about this in person, let me know and we can arrange to meet._

“Hmph,” Dairine said, rolling her eyes, “now _that_ was helpful.” She’d never seen anyone be quite so terse in writing. But she didn’t sense a hostility in the gate tech’s brevity—more like a mind so busy with other problems that answering messages from wizards who weren’t specialists in gating and were, in the large scheme of things, just passing through, probably wasn’t a high priority. But he had asked her to contact him if she was interested in meeting up to discuss the problem further. “It’s a start,” she said, and began drafting a reply.

She was still in the kitchen, busy emptying the dishwasher, when her dad got home from work. He came in carrying a bunch of red-orange dahlias wrapped in paper, which he set down on the counter. Dairine loved the look of dahlias, especially the orangey ones, each flower like its own miniature sun.

“We should get out the old blue vase for those,” Dairine said, putting away the last of the dishes. “You know, the glass one with the wavy edge that reminds Neets of an amoeba?” She snuck a glance at her dad’s face. He didn’t look angry anymore, just tired.

“Your mother was always afraid to use that vase,” her dad said. “Utterly convinced that _someone_ would break it.”

“Someone probably would have,” Dairine said. “Someone probably still will—it’s not like vases die of old age. But it’d look good with those flowers.”

Her father crossed to the counter beside her, then opened one of the top cupboards and got the vase down. Dairine watched as he filled it with water, set it on the counter, and one by one arranged the dahlias inside. “I realize,” he said, removing one of the flowers and snipping a few more inches off of its stem, “that things haven’t been easy for you lately. But there’s no guarantee that they will get easier—and I have to know that I can trust you to keep your promises and be a part of this family, even when things are hard. _Especially_ when things are hard.” He looked up at her over the vase full of flowers. “Tom and Carl have told me they’re authorized to ground you, if they deem it appropriate punishment,” he added, and Dairine felt her stomach clench. Why hadn’t Carl told her this himself? It wasn’t _fair_. She had so much more time to spend in training over the summer, to investigate the mysteries of the Sunstone and to figure out its connection to Roshaun—

“You can relax,” her dad said, drawing her out of her thoughts, “because I told them I thought you had learned your lesson. And that you would _not_ be repeating last night’s late arrival any time soon.” His expression softened, and he said, “I’d really like it if you proved me right.”

“I will,” Dairine said, thinking again about the appointment she’d made with the gate technician on Wellakh to see what could be done about stabilizing her transportation on that end. She’d made a promise, and she meant to do whatever she could to keep it.

*

Deep currents had begun shifting in the council chamber and within the members of the First Families. Four or five new betrothals had been announced in the weeks since Roshaun’s disappearance, and Miril’s sources suggested that at least another two had been promised upon but kept secret, the interested parties waiting to release the information at a time calculated to be most effective. The First Families had always been connected through an intricate network of marriage alliances, so that almost everyone was related, somehow, to everyone else—and almost everyone was a wizard—but most of these new betrothals were between children too young to understand the burden of family ambition being placed upon their little shoulders. Some were no more than toddlers, but it didn’t keep them from being adequate pawns in their elders’ dangerous games.

Sephiri had been betrothed when she was nine and Miril was six. At her mother’s insistence, Miril had been allowed to sit in the room during the betrothal negotiations. “Listen to the Speech,” her mother had said, brushing out Miril’s fine blonde hair, “and think of this as practice.” So Miril had sat at the table with her parents and her sister and the Sunlord, and the prince that her sister would someday marry, and she had listened.

The circumstances of her own betrothal had been far less conventional. Years later, when Miril had returned from her Ordeal—beaten up, worn out, and ready to spend a few weeks by herself, crying at the muddled futility and wonder of the universe—she had been met by her parents standing somber-faced before her, and the Lord of the Lands of Wellakh seated behind them on a couch in the receiving room.

“Miril!” her mother had said, and the pained relief in her voice frightened Miril even more than the Sunlord’s presence. Her mother, who had such a strict mastery over the tone of her voice and the look on her face, would never have allowed herself to be seen like this—so unguarded, and so vulnerable.

Miril held out her hands in formal greeting, wondering if this was some kind of a test, and her mother took them, eschewing all formality and gathering Miril into a tight embrace. When Miril pulled back, she could see the start of tears in her mother’s eyes. “Mother?” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”

Her father stood back from them, his eyes unfocused, and said, “It’s about your sister.”

“Has she gone on Ordeal?” Miril asked. She was still queasy with the aftermath of her own, unsure whether she ought to wish it the same experience on anyone, but Seph had trained so hard for this. She might have been older than Miril, but it wasn’t entirely unheard of for siblings to be offered wizardry out of order, and even now Miril was hopeful.

Her mother pursed her lips, holding back her tears, and shook her head.

“While you were gone,” Miril’s father continued, “there was an attempt. A bomb blast. The palace physicians did the best that they could—but she lost so much blood—” He turned his face away, unable to complete the sentence, but that alone told Miril all she needed to know.

“No,” Miril said, and her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away from her. The words that the Lone One had spoken to her just hours ago played out in her head: _There will be a day when you will not be able to save the one you love from the fire, and that day will come sooner if you refuse to join with me._ “When I left,” Miril stammered out, “she was fine—I told her, I said there was still time for her, that she’d be offered the Oath soon enough—and now she never will—” She was crying now, in front of the king himself, and she did not care. Had she been the cause of this? Was this the Lone One’s way of seeking revenge?

Through a haze of tears, she saw the Sunlord Seriv ke Teliuyve rise from where he had been seated on a plush divan. “I understand this is a trying time for your family,” he said, his voice unbearably calm, “but Nelaid and I are expected to return to the palace shortly. It would be convenient to finalize the arrangements before we must go.”

And for the first time Miril realized that the crown prince was in the room, too—standing half in the shadow cast by the room’s brocade curtains, half in sunlight that caught his hair from behind and made it seem golden. They met eyes, briefly, and he bowed his head in a simple gesture that expressed more real sorrow, and more real respect, than Miril had thought him capable of. She staggered back from the force of it. “Wh-what arrangements?” she asked.

“It’s a simple transfer of betrothal,” the king said. “The possibility was planned for in the initial contract. Now that you have survived your Ordeal, there can be no doubt that you are a suitable replacement for Sephiri am Miril as my son’s future wife. All I require is your signature.” And from the inside fold of his luxurious robes, the king produced a document written over in the flowing characters of the Speech—part spell diagram, part legal contract, abjuring none of the signatories to lie on any part, at the risk of their powers—and handed it over to her.

Somewhere in Miril’s exhausted mind, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Of course the king was not upset. Sephiri had been an impediment to him, not a person, and he did not care how the impediment had been removed, as long as a powerless girl no longer stood in the way of a profitable alliance. He was here not to express his sympathy but to reaffirm the contract that had been made years before Miril wanted to launch herself at the king and cry out against the injustice of being forced into the place of the sister she had loved and lost, without so much as a sign of sympathy from the man she was supposed to serve.

Seph wouldn’t have wanted her to make a scene. It was Seph who had always helped Miril understand the importance of the rules that governed their lives—Seph who had taught Miril that people were more impressed when you got what you wanted by _using_ the rules rather than breaking them. Miril blinked the tears out of her eyes and stared down the king. “Without my signature, the contract is not binding,” she said. She saw her parents exchange a confused look, but she ignored them.

He nodded, slowly, not breaking eye contact. “That is correct.”

Miril looked down at the document in front of her, lacking only the graceful curls of her own name in the Speech, with her new status as post-probationary wizard embedded therein, tying her newly-earned power into the contract. She looked up, met the king’s gaze—and, very deliberately, thrust the paper back toward him unsigned.

Seriv ke Teliuyve, Lord of the Lands of Wellakh, had more cause than any to keep his emotions from being legible on his face, but for a fraction of the second, Miril saw something behind his eyes—something like fear—and felt vindicated in her gesture. “I will not sign,” she said, “unless you swear on your power to find those responsible for murdering my sister, and bring them to justice.”

She must have been imagining it, but for a moment she thought she had seen Nelaid nod his approval, a fierce and mirthless grin across his face.

*

The next day, when Dairine appeared at the coordinates that the gate technician had messaged her, she found herself in the middle of a copse of birch-like trees, whose silvery outer bark had been peeled away in places to reveal the red-tinged layer beneath. The trees’ leaves, red oblongs the size of Dairine’s hand, mingled with the red grass she stood on, and the area was so quiet that were it not for the abundant plant life, Dairine would have thought herself back on the Burnt Side. _Did I get the time wrong?_ she wondered.

She heard the sound of dried leaves crunching behind her, and she turned around to see a middle-aged Wellakhit man weaving between the trees. He was short for a Wellakhit, only about six inches taller than Dairine, and his hair wasn’t even long enough to pull back in a ponytail—something that, given Dairine’s experience with the Welalkhit around the palace, seemed strange. “You must be the Earth wizard,” he said.

He sounded as terse in person as he had in his messages, but Dairine was determined not to take it personally. “Dhairine ke Khallahan,” she said, giving her name the Wellakhit inflection. “And you must be Joreph ke Vashon. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Yes,” Joreph said. “Follow me and I’ll give you a look at the gate.” Before Dairine could even nod in agreement, Joreph had turned around and started back in the direction from which he’d come. Dairine shrugged, and followed him.

He led them out of the trees and into an open space that Dairine took for a park. Paved walks lined with benches meandered around grassy open spaces planted with flowers and trees. Beyond the treetops, Dairine could just see the tops of tall buildings, their windows reflecting back Thathit’s ruddy light.

It was early in the day, but already hot enough that the few other Wellakhit Dairine saw were all seated in the shade. Their gazes fixed on her as she walked by, making her feel more than a little uncomfortable. She’d dressed herself in the clothing of the Wellakhit middle class, a less billowy and more practical take on the tunics and trousers she saw around the palace, and had bound her hair back in a bun like she had seen some of the palace servants do. At a distance, she shouldn’t have stood out—but then she remembered the Sunstone, resting at her throat, marking her out as different with every step.

“Is the worldgate in the park?” Dairine asked, after ten minutes of following Joreph in silence.

“It is nearby,” he said. “The park is the closest place to appear without attracting notice.” He spoke in clipped syllables, and his gaze flicked from side to side as if to check whether anyone could have overheard them.

Dairine’s eyebrows furrowed. “I thought Wellakh was _astahfrith_ ,” she said.

“Discretion is nonetheless advised,” Joreph said, quickening his pace. _Is it just me_ , Dairine thought, _or does he sound…afraid?_

Minutes later, they emerged from the park and into an urban neighborhood. The occasional hovercar zoomed by overhead, but the majority of traffic was gravity-bound, cars and scooters and even the occasional bicycle-like contraption sharing the street so precariously that Dairine hoped Wellakhit society had some equivalent to car insurance—or at least stop signs and crosswalks.

Joreph navigated the streets with the casual assurance of someone who’d lived in a city his entire life, and Dairine followed him as he crossed streets (at both marked and unmarked intersections), turned down covered alleyways, and wove in and out of crowds of fellow pedestrians.

He finally stopped at the plinth of a statue in the middle of a crowded marketplace. Dairine had been here before once or twice, and recognized the plaza as one of the locations where a worldgate was meant to be tethered. The statue itself was all abstract curves, carved out of the same red stone as the mountain palace on the Burnt Side of the planet. She’d always approached it from the opposite side, and paid it little attention, seeing it as nothing more than a landmark, but now for the first time she saw the plaque at the statue’s base:

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN LOST  
AND FOR THOSE WHO REMAIN  
IN THE SHADOW OF THE FIRE

She craned her neck back up at the coils of red stone, and for an instant it was as if they had transformed into the writhing, twisting flames that she now knew they were meant to represent. The Sunstone began to beat against her throat to match her pulse, and she put a hand to it in unconscious gesture, as if doing so would help her to hold in her sudden deep sorrow.

“The gate has been anchored here for the past day,” Joreph said, not noticing or not caring about Dairine’s sudden reaction to the monument. He twisted his palms around each other and then pulled them apart, a gesture similar to the ones Dairine had seen other Wellakhit wizards use to produce the glow of light that was their version of the manual, but Joreph’s gesture flowed into something more complicated—and suddenly Dairine was standing before a patent worldgate.

 _Not exactly discreet_ , Dairine thought grumblingly, but when she looked around to see how the Wellakhit in the square would respond to this sudden wizardly manifestation, she was surprised once more. None of them seemed to have seen a thing.

“It’s selectively patent,” Joreph said. “We’re the only ones who can see it. Care to take a look?”

Dairine nodded, and Joreph stepped back, allowing Dairine to examine the gate more closely. She was no expert, but she’d used enough gates in her time as a wizard to tell that something was _wrong_ with this one. She reached a hand out and slowly brushed it across the surface of the gate. It moved under her fingers like a strange cross between mercury and a soap bubble, beading sluggishly away from her touch with an iridescent sheen, and leaving Dairine with the sense that she was dwarfed by the size of this problem, that she should just give up and move on, because _nothing_ was right here.

But something wasn’t quite right about that feeling. Dairine turned it over in her mind, stepping back and examining it from a distance, as if the thought were not hers—

 _And what if it isn’t?_

She looked away from the gate and back up to the monument beneath which it was anchored, Carl’s words echoing in her head: “Wellakh was gate-capable long before the Burning. The gates that survived it _remember_ it.”

She turned to Joreph. “This gate,” she said. “It’s linked to one of the original gating nexuses—one that was here before the Burning?”

Joreph flinched at her mention of the disaster, but said, “It’s the oldest gate we have left. Until the last century, it was the most stable one we had.”

Dairine squinted up at the statue. “When did that get built?” she asked.

“The statue’s physicality doesn’t affect spacetime in a way that should interfere with the gate—”

“—but it’s a reminder of something that this worldgate would much rather forget,” Dairine said. “Emotions bend spacetime, too. When this monument got built, it forced people to remember the very thing that this gate is afraid of, and focus those memories around the same physical space as the gate itself. No wonder it keeps cutting loose and running away from here!”

Aside from a slight widening of his eyes, Joreph’s expression did not change. “Yes,” he said. “Excuse me for a moment.” He gestured again and this time pulled forth his manual equivalent, then began talking into it as he walked away from Dairine, around the statue’s plinth. “The human wizard may have figured out the problem with the gates,” she heard him say. “Respond as soon as possible. We need to gather a team for an intervention.”

“I might not know gates,” Dairine said, following him, “but if you need any help powering a spell…”

“Yes,” Joreph said, still staring into the light of his manual. “That might work. If you are on-planet, of course,” he added, looking up at her.

“I’ll message you my schedule for this week,” Dairine said, “and you can let me know if it’s going to work out.”

“Good,” Joreph said, turning his attention away from her and back to the ball of tangled light that burnt in his hands.

“Uh…I’ll just be going, then,” Dairine said.

“Yes,” Joreph muttered, no longer paying her any attention.

 _Wouldn’t have pegged him for the absent-minded professor type_ , Dairine thought with a shrug. Though maybe it was just his way of being upset that she had spotted something that he had been missing for all the years he’d spent working on this particular gate. She allowed herself, for a brief moment, to be pleased. Salvaging Wellakh’s gating system was not exactly what she had set out to do—but all things considered, it was a pretty good start to her day.

*

Between her Ordeal, her sister’s funeral, and her betrothal celebrations, Miril hadn’t had a moment’s rest in weeks, so when she entered her private sitting room to find Nelaid sitting straight-backed in a leather armchair, she cared less about what he might be doing there and more about getting him to leave her in peace.

He stood when she entered, and bowed to her. “My lady.”

Miril returned his bow. “Your father wouldn’t approve of you coming to see me,” she said, keeping her tone neutral, regulating her expression.

“My father,” Nelaid said, “is a bastard.”

In anyone else, Miril might have expected this was a trick to draw her out into treason, but this soon after their betrothal, anything she said would reflect as poorly upon the royal family as it would upon her own. And she did not think that Nelaid was counterfeiting the anger that she heard in his voice and saw on his face.

Still choosing her words carefully, she said, “Is this what brings you here?”

“After a fashion,” Nelaid said. “I wanted to apologize for his callousness the other day—and to assure you that I do not share it.”

“I thank you for your sympathy,” Miril said, sinking into the nearest armchair. The last thing she wanted to do at this moment was talk with the prince. But they would seek unionbond together someday, and it would do no good to push him away now. “You can sit down if you like,” she said, half expecting him to remain standing.

He sat down across from her, his posture losing some of its tension. “I know what it feels like to lose a sibling,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “My younger brother was also the victim of an assassination.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Miril had known this, but in the chaos and exhaustion of her grief, the facts hadn’t connected. “I’m sorry,” she said, letting her own sorrow creep into her voice. She had a vague memory of Auren ke Seriv as a feisty boy with a wicked grin and a penchant for playing practical jokes on the palace staff. “You must miss him.”

“It feels like ages ago,” he said, looking down at where his hands were folded in his lap. “Father never speaks of him. Mother doesn’t dare. They found the man who pulled the trigger, and they had him arrested, but he hanged himself in prison before he could be questioned. The investigators suspected he had ties to a group that calls itself the Brotherhood of the Sun—anarchists, mostly, but willing to be bought if the price is high enough and the objectives in line with their own.” He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Tomorrow, I suspect you will learn from the Sunlord that a man has been imprisoned for your sister’s murder. I suspect he will _not_ tell you that this man is also connected to the Brotherhood, and that the chances of his leading us back to them are slim to none.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Miril said.

“I want to find the people responsible for killing Auren. You want to find the people responsible for killing Sephiri. We both want them to be stopped, and we’re young enough that we just might have the kind of power we need to do it.”

Miril’s eyes widened as she began to realize the extent of what she had gotten herself into. Beneath that regal exterior, there lived a vendetta that burned as hot and as strong as hers, coupled with an incisive mind powered by a demanding logic. “No one would ever approve—”

“No one would ever have to _know_.” There was a pause, and Nelaid must have sensed her reluctance. “Sometimes,” he said, leaning forward and softening his voice, “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. And in this case, doing this ourselves might be the only way to get it done.”

“This Brotherhood,” Miril said, still trying to take everything in. “What exactly are their objectives?”

“They want to democratize the distribution of wizardry on this planet,” Nelaid said, “and they are convinced that the complete extermination of the First Families is the only way to achieve this goal.”

“So they’ll try to kill us, too?”

Nelaid’s face was grim as he said, “They’ve already tried to kill me. But I don’t intend to give them the satisfaction of succeeding.” He met her gaze and held out his hand.

“Neither do I,” Miril said, and she took it.

*

On a hunch, Dairine had asked Spot to give her a list of places of interest near permanent gate locations. The hunch was validated when she discovered that all of the major gates on the planet were meant to be located near some memorial to the burning. It made some strange kind of sense—the kinds of places where population pressure could spawn worldgates were also generally places of cultural value, making them perfect places to erect monuments.

She’d sent this discovery to Joreph along with her schedule, and received a message in return, telling her that it did not appear she would be needed for the intervention, but thanking her for her observations and wishing her luck with her own projects. He had also informed her, with apologies, that the process of shifting the gates would require them _all_ to be offline for a period of three days prior to the transfer, but although it inconvenienced Dairine, it certainly didn’t change her plans. Between losing a few days’ work, and having to transit home under her own steam at the end of it, she would always choose the latter—even if she was getting worse and worse headaches lately, the kind that even a couple of aspirin couldn’t cure. She was sleeping poorly, too, sneaking coffee in order to stay awake in front of her dad and Nita, but at least she wasn’t having any more nightmares, or if she was, they vanished with the sound of her alarm when she woke up.

And all of these were minor nuisances, anyway, considering that she was beginning to feel like she was making real progress with the Sunstone. Nelaid had her working with the model of Thahit, simulating more and more complex intervention scenarios, instructing her primarily about how to draw additional power and focus from the stone. But as Dairine funneled more power through it and from it, she began to get a feel for the flavor it left in her mind, and she was starting to suspect it could be used to do more than Nelaid knew how to teach her—that perhaps this was something that Roshaun had been beginning to figure out before his disappearance—and that maybe, just maybe, their last joint working had left some kind of trace in the stone itself that Dairine could follow back to Roshaun.

She did not tell Nelaid. _I wouldn’t want to get his hopes up,_ she told herself sternly, even though she knew that was only a part of it. She was afraid that if she told him her plans, he would tell her that they were impossible. It would not have kept her from following through with them—but that sliver of doubt might have kept her from succeeding.

On the third and final day of the worldgate shut-down, Dairine instructed Spot to alert her an hour before her usual curfew. When his alarm sounded, she had just finished the last task that Nelaid had set her, and was standing back while he evaluated the diagrams she’d drawn out on the ground. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees, and felt a droplet of sweat slide from her forehead down her cheek. Even in miniature, commanding the attention of a star and imposing her will on it was hard work, and she was not looking forward to gating home. _One thing at a time_ , she thought, as Nelaid took his time circling the simulation.

“You’re getting better,” he said. His voice was flat, but coming from him, Dairine knew it amounted to real praise. He turned to look at her, and she straightened up to look back at him. “I will see you again tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said, and bowed to him. He gave her a curt nod, and vanished.

Spot scurried out from under the simulation of Thahit and popped a few eyestalks up in her direction. _Should I begin setting up the return transit?_

“Not quite yet,” Dairine said. “There’s something else I want to try first.”

Her legs weren’t as steady as she would have liked, so she lowered herself to the floor in front of the simulation. She was tired—maybe too tired to try this—but she had to know. Her hands, at least, did not shake as she reached up and removed the Sunstone from her neck, setting the gold collar down on the floor in front of her. The light from the model sun seemed to burn through the gem, darkening its usually paler fire with a hint of Thahit’s red.

Dairine took a deep breath, focused her mind, and stared into the heart of the Sunstone.

The heat hit her like a wave, buffeting her focus and stealing the breath from her lungs, but Dairine was prepared. She had worked with Sol, she had worked with Thahit, she knew what the stars felt like from the inside out, and she should be able to separate their signatures within the Sunstone from whatever else Roshaun might have left behind, and when she did that she could find him. She fought the dizziness and pushed further through the roiling tongues of flame, listening to the rhythms that underlay the chaos, letting them surge and fall and carry her along with them, down in to the heart of the memories of the stone, delving deeper through the fires it had seen and survived. She felt her body tip over, sprawling on the floor of the simulation room, but her mind was still with the stone, sorting out the threads of its memory, reaching into the midst of it all—

—and seeing a shadow, a glint of white gold, a lock of that utterly ridiculous hair—

—and reaching out to grasp it, and _missing_ , and falling—

 _Roshaun!_

The world was dark, but Dairine heard voices at the edge of things. “I had worried about this. Why did you leave her alone?”

“She said she was leaving. I did not believe she required babysitting.”

A pause, followed by a cool hand on her forehead. “You are too much like her. And right now, that is _not_ a compliment.”

Dairine tried to say something, but what came out was more like a whimper.

A sigh. “Well, she’s not going home tonight.” The hand was removed from her forehead. A pair of strong arms lifted her up, and she gave in to unconsciousness.

*

Dairine woke up in the middle of the night and wondered for a moment if she was still dreaming. She lay on her back in a bed too large and too soft to be hers, staring out at a large chamber dimly lit by a series of tiny blue-white bulbs that peeked out of the crease where the wall met the ceiling. She shifted over to one side and felt a smooth, gauzy fabric against her skin. She wasn’t even wearing her own pajamas. The Sunstone sat on a table at the bedside, and without thinking, Dairine reached out for it and clasped it once again around her neck.

The clasp clicked shut and with a sudden rush of embarrassment, Dairine remembered exactly what she’d done. She winced. How was Nelaid going to trust her with the model again if she couldn’t even tell when she was pushing herself too far? And her own father—

A sudden thud startled Dairine out of her post-sleep haze. In a flush of adrenaline, she reached into the back of her mind and began to recite the first syllables of her favorite self-defense spell, but common sense stopped her from deploying it. She was in the royal palace on Wellakh, the most secure place on the entire planet. She probably had a billion guards keeping watch outside her door. Not to mention she was still so worn out that the mere thought of attempting another spell gave her a headache. She relaxed her muscles, settled back down into the bedcovers, and tried not to think about what Nelaid would say when she saw him again…or what her dad would say when she told him. _God, he’s going to kill me_ , she thought. She didn’t even have the energy to be anything other than resigned about it. All she wanted to do at this point was to go back to sleep and forget that all of this had happened.

She rolled over, intending to do just that, and saw a black-clad figure step out of the shadows. The small lights glittered off of the blade of a knife easily ten inches long and held easily in the figure’s right hand, and Dairine barely had time to gasp in shock before he was on her, pinning her to the bed with his weight and angling his weapon at her throat.

In her head, Dairine raced through the syllables of a basic shield wizardry, but instead of feeling the world go quiet around her, the words in the Speech felt like a series of foreign sounds inside her head. “Let me go!” she yelled, the panic overcoming her. “You’ve got the wrong room! I haven’t done anything!”

She heard a chuckle, and a deep voice said, “For someone who’s smart enough to figure out what we did to the gates, you’re really awfully stupid.”

“What you _did_ —?” Dairine stammered, heart pounding. Not a dream. The gates had been deliberately destabilized—why, she didn’t know, but figuring it out had made her a liability—

Dairine flinched away from the assassin’s laugh, which reminded her of another she’d heard on her Ordeal, and in the worst of the nightmares that came after. “Wellakh belongs to the Wellakhit,” he said. “We do not need _aliens_ making use of our gates, invading our planet with their strange cultures and their wrongheaded alliances.”

Again, Dairine reached for the wizardry, but felt the words fall like water through her fingers.

“I’ve put a damper on all personal wizardries in this suite of rooms,” the shadow said. “So it’s no use trying to get out, or hoping that someone will come to save you.”

She felt the edge of the knife slide along the upper edge of the Sunstone’s gold torc, millimeters from her jugular. A strange clarity came over Dairine. _I am about to be assassinated_ , she thought.

“I would have to disagree with that,” a voice said from the other side of the room.

The assassin took a shocked look over his shoulder, relaxing his grip on Dairine for just a moment—but even though she’d stopped getting beaten up years back, she had never forgotten her jujitsu lessons. The first rule of close combat was to strike when your opponent was distracted. Before he could turn back, Dairine batted his knife away with her free hand and lunged forward, headbutting him solidly in the jaw. Her head exploded in pain, and she fell back onto the bed, stars swimming before her eyes, her lower body still pinned beneath her attacker. She really hoped the owner of that voice would help her out of this one, because otherwise she’d hardly done anything other than make her murderer angry.

Dairine felt the weight lifted from her legs as someone hurled the attacker off the bed, and flinched at the thud of his impact. Still woozy, incapable of lifting her head, she heard the sounds of the struggle that was playing out mere feet from her. Then, suddenly, the sounds stopped. Dairine took a moment to summon her strength, and slowly pulled herself upright—to see the Lady of the Lands of Wellakh hog-tying the unconscious attacker with a pair of curtain ties pulled from the nearest window. She was in pajamas, her hair in a single braid that had fallen over her shoulder as she worked.

She turned and saw Dairine sitting up in her bed. “Are you alright?” she asked, finishing off one knot and beginning on another.

“I—uh, yeah,” Dairine said, head still spinning from all that had happened to her in the last five minutes. “How did you get here—?”

“The palace is worked through with old wizardries to allow the rulers of Wellakh clandestine access to many of its suites,” she said, sitting back on her heels and surveying her handiwork. “In the past the network has mostly been used for espionage, but it’s old enough that your attacker’s spell didn’t disable it.”

“Oh,” Dairine said. Then, “You know how to _fight_?”

In answer, Miril held up the knife that Dairine had knocked out of her attacker’s hand, and balanced it along her index finger. “Before I became queen,” she said, “Nelaid and I spend several years tracking down an organization known as the Brotherhood of the Sun. They’d killed people we loved, so we learned how to fight back—sometimes with wizardry, sometimes without.” She shrugged.

“The Brotherhood?” Dairine said. She’d read about them, back when she had devoured everything the manual would tell her about Wellakh. They had been responsible for thousands of assassinations, going back almost a hundred years, but about thirty years ago they’d been forced into hiding by a series of perfectly-executed counterattacks. Speculation ran rampant as to who, exactly, had been responsible for decommissioning the organization, and even the manual was silent on the matter. “ _You_ took down the _Brotherhood_?” Dairine squeaked.

“Not so loud,” Nelaid said, having suddenly appeared beside Miril. Dairine jumped at his appearance, but the knife Miril was balancing didn’t even waver. “I’ve disabled his spell,” he told his wife. “Our wizardries will work now. I’ve scanned the place, but it looks like he was alone.”

Miril nodded, handed the dagger off to Nelaid, and walked over to the side of Dairine’s bed. “We don’t exactly go around advertising the fact,” she said, flipping her braid back over her shoulder, “but yes—we took down the Brotherhood.”

“Though we don’t appear to have done as good of a job as we thought,” Nelaid said, examining the knife. “This man’s dagger bears their insignia.”

“Oh god,” Dairine said, letting out a shaky breath, “this is just too much.” She hated to admit weakness in any form, but her head was alternating between pounding and throbbing, and not just from her well-timed headbutt. There was just too much information swimming around, bits and pieces of it colliding with each other and ricocheting off the walls of her seriously overworked brain.

“Rest,” Miril said, laying a cool hand on Dairine’s forehead. “I’ll be right here, and we can talk more about all of this when you wake up.”

Dairine wanted to protest that she was far too amped up to sleep, but her head felt heavy, and against her will she found herself sinking down against the pillows. She felt Miril rearrange them beneath her head and pull the light covers up under her chin, and then she fell asleep.

*

Miril had kept her word and stayed at Dairine’s bedside while Nelaid transported the man who had attacked her to the palace’s holding facilities. In the coming months they would mount a more thorough official investigation, but Miril already knew with a disgusting certainty what they would find. How could they have been so foolish, to imagine that two young wizards had been able to utterly destroy an organization that had existed for generations? How much should she and Nelaid reveal to the Council about their involvement with the Brotherhood thirty years before? What would they do, now that the Brotherhood was back? There was only one thing she knew for sure: the calm was over, and the storm was headed their way.

“You should get some rest.” She turned to see Nelaid standing in the threshold. “I’ve got a contingent of guards around this room, more of them monitoring remotely, and I’ve set up a few wizardries, just in case.”

“You think they’ll come back?”

“No,” Nelaid said. “But I know you won’t look after yourself until you’re sure she’s safe.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and for a moment they both stood beside the bed of the alien girl who had caused them both so much grief in the past months. _But she wasn’t the cause_ , Miril thought, watching her sleep. _She was just there. All of our grief, she shares with us, as much as she can…and she has a grief of her own, beyond what we have known._

She bent down and gently pressed her forehead against Dairine’s, before rising and following Nelaid back to their rooms.

*

When Miril reentered Dairine’s room several hours later, she was surprised to find her awake, sitting at one end of the large plush couch and staring at her backpack on the ground in front of her.

“Going somewhere?”

Dairine looked up slowly, entirely unsurprised by Miril’s presence. “I need to tell my dad what’s happened,” she said. “He’ll probably think it’s best if I stay at home for a while.”

Miril nodded. “He isn’t the only one,” she said, crossing the room and taking a seat next to Dairine on the couch.

Dairine let out a long sigh. “I’ve been so stupid,” she said. “I was so focused on figuring out the Sunstone—using it to find Roshaun—I didn’t even think about what having me here would mean for Wellakhit politics.” She shook her head. “I hope I haven’t screwed up too much.”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” Miril said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “This was always going to be a difficult period to navigate, politically speaking, and we’re not out of it yet, not by a long shot. But having you here”—and she reached out to lay a hand on Dairine’s shoulder—“was never about politics.”

“What was it about?”

Miril took a deep breath in, felt the tears forming, and for once didn’t try to hide them. She turned her head, looked Dairine in the eye, and said, “It was about doing the right thing…for you, and for us. It was about grieving. But it was also about recovery.”

Dairine looked at Miril, her expression full of pain and fear and hope. “He isn’t dead, you know,” she whispered, broken-voiced. “It’s not in the manual, and the manual doesn’t lie. I’m going to find him.”

Miril shook her head and said, with a small smile, “I don’t doubt you for a minute. But I want you to know it’s not just about that. You are important, Dairine. Nelaid and I, we grew up in this world, we walk around in it every day, and we see the same things over and over again without taking notice. But you’ve helped us see some of it differently.”

“Like what?” Dairine asked, sounding doubtful.

“Like our own xenophobia,” Miril admitted. “Before you were here, I never realized what a mess our gating system was in. I never needed to use it, so it didn’t matter. But you _made_ it matter—and you made me see that a gate is more than just a gate. Wellakh was once at the center of trade, technology, even tourism in this part of the galaxy, but we’ve isolated ourselves so thoroughly that we’ve stopped _caring_ that we’re all alone. The impulse to withdraw, to pull inward—these are the signs of a Power with whom I would have no dealings.”

Dairine’s expression was a little to grim to count as a smile, but her eyes had regained some of her fire. “From what I hear, That One has had every reason to be afraid of you for _ages_ ,” she said.

“From what _I_ hear,” Miril replied, “the same goes for you. I may have met the Lone One before, but I certainly didn’t prompt his Reconfiguration.”

Dairine’s cheeks reddened a bit. “That was mostly an accident,” she said, “and it was all over before I could get scared enough to bail out. But you and Nelaid—what you did, going out and hunting down the members of the Brotherhood—that took _years_.” She looked down at her lap and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Not at all.”

“When you gave it up—when you became the queen—was it hard? Do you miss it?”

Miril looked at Dairine, and in a flash realized that her comparisons of this girl to her husband or her son had been all wrong. Here, sitting next to her, was someone eerily similar to the person _she_ had been around this age: thrust into responsibilities she didn’t entirely understand and certainly hadn’t asked for, hiding her sense of weakness and inadequacy behind a series of jobs well done, always afraid that one day it wouldn’t be enough and the fire would die out and leave her all burnt up with nothing to show for her pain but a trail of ashes.

“Of course it was hard,” Miril said slowly. “But it got a lot easier when I stopped thinking about it as giving something up and started to see it as achieving old goals in new ways. Two upstart young wizards might have managed to scare one illegal organization into hiding, but the Lord and Lady of Wellakh could tackle the problems that encouraged societies like the Brotherhood to form in the first place. It’s the same fight now as it was then. We’re just working with modified techniques—and with slightly different resources. They might not be what we’re used to, but I like to think we’re still getting the job done.”

Dairine sighed. “That sounds like the last thing I’ll be doing for a while. Dad’ll have my head for this one, and that’s before my own Seniors get started with me. I’ll be lucky if I get clearance to come back here anytime in the next year.” The frustration was palpable in her voice, but so was something a lot more like resignation.

“I don’t think I would blame them,” Miril said delicately. She didn’t want to scare Dairine away, but the girl had to understand that what she’d done wasn’t something she could afford to do again. “It’s not your fault that you didn’t think through the political ramifications of being here—that’s Nelaid’s and my responsibility—but the way you were throwing your power around? You can’t keep it up.”

“I know,” Dairine said. “I’ve always known. But sometimes it doesn’t seem all that important. I’ve always been good at pushing myself. Not so good at figuring out how far I can push before something breaks.” She turned and looked at Miril with a fierce light behind her eyes. “And I _care_ about Wellakh,” she said. “I want to find Roshaun, and I want to bring him back to the throne, but it’s more than that. There’s work for me here. I can _feel_ it. And I hate feeling like I don’t have what it takes to get the job done.” She slumped back against the couch cushions and sighed.

Miril remembered those summers at the house by the lake, and what her sister had always told her to get her through the times when she had felt like she was busy letting everyone down. “You have enough, you do enough, you _are_ enough,” she said, softly. “Seph would tell me that when things got hard. I’d say it applies to your situation, too.”

Dairine smiled—a small smile, but genuine, and one of the few Miril had seen since Roshaun’s discovery. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll remember that.”

“It would be nice, though, to be able to transit from place to place with the blink of an eye,” Miril said with a wry grin, “or the push of a button.”

Beside her, Dairine sat up in shock. “Oh my god,” she said.

“Are you alright?” Miril asked, trying to get a look at Dairine’s expression, since her tone had been unreadable.

“Oh my god,” Dairine repeated, “I have been so stupid!” But she sounded more excited than frustrated, and there was a great big smile on her face. She turned to Miril and said, “You are so right. About everything.”

Dairine grabbed her backpack and stood up. Miril stood too, wondering what sudden brainstorm she had just witnessed. “Going home?” she asked.

Dairine grinned. “I’m going to see a girl about a worldgate.”

*

Dairine found Carmela lounging on the couch in the Rodriguez family living room, simultaneously watching the TV and talking at it in the Speech.

“Oh, don’t go into the building unarmed!” Carmela yelled at the TV, where a multi-legged alien form was climbing through a triangular window. A second later, her comment appeared on the lower third of the screen, transcribed in the Speech and echoing a number of other comments.

“Hey, Carmela,” Dairine said. “What are you _doing_?”

“Live-tweeting this TV show!” she said.

Dairine raised an eyebrow. “Aliens have Twitter?”

“Same concept,” Carmela said, turning over to look at Dairine over the back of the couch. “But I doubt you’re here to discuss the intricacies of comparative intergalactic social networking.”

“Maybe some other time,” Dairine said—finding that she was, against her will, a little bit interested, and smiling, not just at Mela’s infectious good nature, but at how good it felt to _be_ interested in something other than her work. “But first,” she said, reminding herself that she’d need to keep this quick if she wanted to keep her dad from freaking out even more than he already was, “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your closet.”

“Ooh, are they having some kind of party at the palace you need to get all dolled up for?” Carmela was on her feet in an instant.

Dairine laughed. “Sorry, I should have been more specific—this is less about the normal contents of your closet, more about the abnormal ones.”

“Less fun,” Carmela pouted. “But you _would_ come to see me, if you _did_ need to dress up for a fancy alien shindig?”

“Of course, but that’s not what’s important right now,” Dairine said. “Theoretically, if I were to use your worldgate to go somewhere that didn’t have a gate of its own already installed, would I be able to get back?”

“Oh, sure,” Carmela said, “you can take the remote with you and just press a few buttons. If you couldn’t, then what use would _that_ be? Well, for me, anyway,” she amended. “Of course _you_ could just hit a few keys on this lovely little guy,” and she bent down to pat Spot’s outer casing, “and _wham_ , back where you started!”

Dairine found that she couldn’t stop smiling. Sure, she’d been wrong a lot lately—but she’d also, at least on occasion, been right, and this was starting to look like one of those times. “It’s not always so easy,” she said. “Would you mind if I use your gate to transit to and from Wellakh for a bit? At least until they get their gating system back up and running.”

“You may do whatever you like with my gate,” Carmela said, “on one condition,” and she held up a single slim finger, inches from Dairine’s face.

“What’s that?”

Carmela looked around, as if checking to see if the coast was clear, and then said, “Get your sister and my brother to finally tell our parents that they’re dating!” She rolled her eyes. “I promised Kit I wouldn’t tell on him, but not being able to humiliate him with impunity over dinner every night is really starting to cramp my style.”

Dairine smiled. “Done,” she said. After all, she would need _something_ to amuse herself with while she waited out her inevitable grounding.

*

When Miril found Nelaid, he was leaning against a railing at the edge of one of the balconies near the top of the palace spire. For a minute, she saw another there, sitting and dangling his legs through the gaps in the railing, and looking out across the lands that would one day be his…

She shook her head free of this memory of her son, and walked over to stand beside her husband.

“We will have to go to the Council about this,” she said, laying a hand on top of Nelaid’s where it rested on the railing’s edge. “They must be informed that the Brotherhood is at work again, and that they have been behind the problems with the worldgates.”

Nelaid sighed. “I thought you wanted to minimize the chaos of this transition,” he said.

“That strategy,” Miril said, leaning up against him and looking out over the long, flat plain, “doesn’t seem to be an option anymore.”

“So what _do_ we do?”

“What we do best,” Miril said. “We fight.”

“We _win_ ,” Nelaid corrected.

Miril smiled.

They stood and watched as the bottom of Thahit’s red-gold disc disappeared beneath the horizon, briefly gilding the Burnt Side plains with its fiery light. For a moment, in the brightness, Miril could almost see Wellakh as it had been—large plains covered in swathes of red grass, dotted with mountain ranges, subject to the infinitesimal movements of the great glaciers at the pole—and as it could be—inhabited by a people who had endured hardships, but come out ahead, and who would keep up the pattern, even if it took them a little bit longer this time around.

Together Miril and Nelaid turned away from the dying light and toward the work that would help them remake the world in the image they had dreamed.


End file.
